Up
Serious Peter Gabriel fans will tell you it’s impossible to judge a new album until enough time has passed and a longer narrative can be read. It took *10* years for this follow-up to *Us* to surface; expectations were high, and it was uncertain if the fans who’d been adventurous when *Melt*, *Security*, or *So* were released would be accepting years later. Gabriel is, after all, a man who doesn’t write what he thinks his fans will want, but what he knows he needs. And *Up* has been followed with an album of covers, another of orchestral re-recordings of older songs, a live album, and a greatest-hits collection, making *Us* a focal point of Gabriel\'s recent work. Its songs—with their emphasis on birth and, more often, life working toward death—sound ever more desperate. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died before the completion of “Signal to Noise.” Yet, if one lets *Up* be “just” an album, songs such as “Darkness,” “Growing Up,” “No Way Out,” “I Grieve,” and “Signal to Noise” work beautifully as songs.
The final part of the two-letter, single-syllable trilogy. Produced by Peter (and mixed by Tchad Blake and Stephen Hague). Hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings were made, ultimately being slimmed down to the final ten tracks. UP soon reveals itself to be another deeply personal statement, with birth and death being near-constant themes. Mostly recorded at Real World (although some initial recordings were made in Senegal, France and on a boat on the Amazon), the album sees contributions from the likes of Peter Green, Danny Thompson, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Daniel Lanois, the Black Dyke Band, Peter’s daughter Melanie and the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Such is the case with Peter Gabriel, who delivered Up in 2002, a decade after Us and four years after he announced its title.